Donna O’Connell-Gilmore earned an MA in clinical social work at Boston University, and developed a psychotherapy practice in the rural suburbs west of Boston. She also wrote a long-standing weekly column in regional newspapers about birds and birding. In the late 1990’s she moved to the shores of Cape Cod and began to seriously write poetry. Donna’s poems have been published in Willow Springs, Blueline Journal, Hopper’s, Off the Coast, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Written River, Glassworks, Provincetown Magazine, Prime Time, Anthology Tell-Tale Inklings, Big Windows Review, Turtle Island Quarterly and other literary journals. Broadsided Press exhibited her work on Cape Cod buses. Her chapbook Africa is the Mother Who Lies in the Grass: Poems on Safari won second place from Writer’s Digest for best self-published poetry collection. In two successive years she won first place in the Katherine Lee Bates Poetry Fest, and first place in The Women’s Association’s “In Her Own Voice”. She was a winner in the Joe Gueveia Outermost Poetry Contests. On radio she has analyzed her poems about intimacy in couple and family relationships. She is a regular at open mics on the Cape and she maintains a part-time practice of psychotherapy. She is passionate about critters and her email reads “wolvesaregods”.

Chuck Madansky is a psychotherapist in semi-retirement. His poetry has been published in the Cape Cod Poetry Review and several anthologies, and has been featured on WCAI. His awards include the 1984 Thoreau Award from the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, the 1990 First Writing Award from the Society for Family Therapy and Research, and the 2010 Cornerstone Award from the Barnstable County Human Rights Commission for his work on ending torture. In 2013, Chuck undertook a week-long fast in solidarity with the hunger-striking detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He also twice walked 120 miles with Buddhists, from Atlanta to Fort Benning, GA, to call for the closure of the School of the Americas, where the U.S. government trains dictators and paramilitary from Central and South America in ‘counterinsurgency’ techniques, including torture. Chuck lives in Brewster by Rafe Pond with his wife, poet and playwright Wilderness Sarchild, and their dog Ruby. He has recently been active with the Brewster Ponds Coalition and Habitat for Humanity